Jack Mustard, in the spa, with a baseball bat

In 1943, a Birmingham solicitor lamented that the war was killing the country's social life, so he invented a board game to bring back the fun. Now, Cluedo has been rebranded - with a Hollywood mansion replacing the English country house. By Kate Summerscale

Friday 19 December 2008 19.01 EST
First published on Friday 19 December 2008 19.01 EST

In 1948, the year the first game of Cluedo was sold in Britain, the poet WH Auden outlined the requirements of detective fiction. His essay, The Guilty Vicarage: Notes On The Detective Story, By An Addict, argued that the sleuth should investigate a murder committed within a closed and closely related community, so that all the characters were suspects. Auden recommended the use of maps and timetables, and he favoured a prosperous setting. "The country is preferable to the town," he wrote, "a well-to-do neighbourhood (but not too well-to-do or there will be a suspicion of ill-gotten gains) better than a slum. The corpse must shock not only because it is a corpse but also because, even for a corpse, it is shockingly out of place, as when a dog makes a mess on a drawing room carpet."

The original Cluedo game was based on the novels of the golden age of detective fiction, and it conformed to Auden's precepts. A limited number of suspects are confined in a country house riddled with secret passages and littered with potential instruments of death. The building is shown in plan, like a map, and the corridors are overlaid with a grid.

At the board's centre is a cellar, on the steps of which an X marks the spot at which a murdered body has been found. This is the event that has transformed the house into a crime scene. The players, who are both suspects and sleuths, must discover the truth about the crime by a process of elimination, moving from ballroom to billiard room to library, and methodically crossing off the possibilities on small printed charts. The shocking, messy event is resolved by maths, order restored by the application of logic.

A new edition of the game, Cluedo Reinvention, has been released this year in time for Christmas. In some respects it plays by Auden's rules, but the setting would probably be too affluent for his taste, and certainly too urban and American: "I find it very difficult," he confessed, "to read [a detective novel] that is not set in rural England."

In the new Cluedo, the murder takes place in a shiny Hollywood residence instead of a gloomy English mansion. The characters have been updated: Colonel Mustard is now Jack Mustard, a famous football player; Miss Scarlett is Kasandra Scarlet, the "hottest star on the movie scene"; Professor Plum is Victor Plum, a billionaire video-game designer (catchphrase: "Finally I am the cool crowd"). Instead of the lead piping, we have a baseball bat; instead of a billiard room, a spa; and instead of a cellar, a swimming pool. The gun is fitted with a silencer.

The new game's co-designer explained: "We wanted something that the mom or dad who's bringing it home for the family could say, 'This is what I remember and this is what I want to play with my kids', and at the same we wanted something that the kids would feel belonged to them and was very appealing to them. So we tried to blend those two worlds."

But Cluedo was always set in an imagined, long-ago world. It's not as if those American moms and dads had first-hand experience of gothic country piles thronging with cooks and vicars and colonels. And nor did the game's inventor, Anthony Ernest Pratt, a 40-year-old solicitor's clerk living in suburban Birmingham in 1943.

Britain was at war. Pratt was serving as a fire warden for the ARP (Air Raid Precautions) and as a soldier in the Home Guard. He also did his bit by working in one of the city's factories, where almost half a million Brummies were churning out Spitfires, Hurricanes, shells, tanks, amphibian craft and submachine guns. These factories endured a long bombing campaign: during the Birmingham Blitz of 1940 to 1943, the Luftwaffe destroyed 13,000 buildings and took more than 2,000 lives.

Pratt's private response to the war was idiosyncratic. One summer evening in 1943, as he was leaning on his garden fence, "it dawned on me that this wretched old war was killing the country's social life". He yearned for the days of old, he said, when "we lived like lords. All the bright young things would congregate in each other's homes for parties at weekends. We would play a stupid game called Murder, where guests crept up on each other in corridors, and the victim would shriek and fall to the floor. Then came the war and the blackout and it all went, 'Pouf!' Overnight, all the fun ended. We were reduced to creeping off to the cinema between air raids to watch thrillers ... I did so miss the partying and those awful games of murder."

Pratt described himself as "an introvert, full of ruminations, speculations and imaginative notions". While the bombs fell on his city, he found himself hankering after games of fantasy violence, in which the blackouts were voluntary and the killings make-believe. Like the thrillers he crept off to watch in the cinema, these parlour games made suspense a pleasure.

Pratt and his wife Elva were friendly with a Mr and Mrs Bull, who lived near them in the Birmingham suburb of Kings Heath and who just before the war had sold a treasure-hunting game idea to the toy-makers Waddingtons (the Bulls' game, Buccaneer, remained in production until the 80s). Inspired by their neighbours' success, the Pratts decided to devise an entertainment based on Murder. Elva was the better artist, so she designed the board. The first floorplan was sketched on a piece of cardboard and the original pawns were matchsticks coloured in with crayon. The Pratts invited friends over to try out the prototypes.

Detective novels had become extremely popular in the interwar years, and increasingly formulaic - many read almost as puzzles or brainteasers. The genre was ripe for adaptation as a logic game. The novel on which Pratt seems to have drawn most directly was Agatha Christie's The Body In The Library, published in 1942, which opens with Colonel and Mrs Bantry of Gossington Hall discovering in their dusty library the corpse of a young, platinum-blond dancer called Ruby Keene.

From the start, Pratt included a mustachioed colonel as one character in his game and a foxy platinum-blond woman as another. Miss Scarlett not only looks like Ruby Keene, but she has a similarly suggestive name - she brings a dangerous sexual frisson to the musty country house.

In December 1944, after 18 months of tinkering with his invention, Pratt filed a preliminary patent application, which he followed up just under a year later with the full specifications. These included illustrations of nine weapons, probably drawn by Elva: an axe, a cudgel, a round fizzing bomb, a piece of rope, a dagger, a revolver, a hypodermic syringe, a bottle of poison and a poker.

Of these, only the rope, gun and dagger made it into the finished game, along with three new implements - a candlestick, a spanner and a length of lead piping. Pratt's patent application shows 10 rooms on the board, of which one (the gun room) was subsequently dropped, and 10 characters - Doctor Black, Mr Brown, Mr Gold, The Rev Mr Green, Miss Grey, Professor Plum, Miss Scarlet (spelled with only one "t" in the patent paperwork), Nurse White, Mrs Silver and Colonel Yellow. There were side elevations of two pawns, one in the shape of a long-necked bottle (this was to represent the male characters) and the other a squat bottle (for the women). The patent was granted in April 1947.

With the Bulls' help, the Pratts arranged a meeting with Norman Watson, the managing director of Waddingtons, at his office in Leeds. Watson had been engaged in his own game of secrets through much of the war. From 1941, at the request of MI9, he had slipped escape tools into board games destined for British prisoner-of-war camps: tiny metal implements and silk maps of Norway, Sweden, Germany and France. In a reversal of his usual business, he had sent out real charts and weapons disguised as toys.

Watson quickly struck a deal with the Pratts, asking only that Colonel Yellow be renamed Colonel Mustard (yellow, the colour of cowardice, "had certain connotations inappropriate in a military man"). Though postwar shortages delayed production for a few months, the first sets of Cluedo were distributed in England in 1948 and in the US in 1949. The name - Pratt's idea - was an amalgam of "clue" and "Ludo", a late-19th-century English board game that in Latin means "I play". Since Americans were unfamiliar with Ludo, the US version was called Clue.

The board's colours and design had a 30s, art deco look: the bright pistachio surround, the mustard-yellow tiles in the hallways, the pale beige rooms and the looping Cluedo logo on the darkening, bottle-green steps to the cellar. In the original set, the rope was made of thick, twisted thread and the five other weapons were cast in solid metal. There were just six characters, each represented by a coloured plastic pawn (all the same shape and height) and by a portrait on a card. Mrs Peacock is imperious. Mrs White is boot-faced. The Reverend Green is smoothly pious.

The game enjoyed immediate success, and more than 150 million sets have been sold over the past 60 years. A Cluedo-inspired film, Clue, appeared in 1985, and a British Cluedo gameshow, featuring former television stars such as Rula Lenska, Kate O'Mara and Andrew Sachs, ran from 1990 to 1993. Though sales of all board games have slowed since the advent of computers, video and DVD, Cluedo has kept its place in the international top 10. For the most part, the same characters have been used all over the world, though there are some regional variations: in Germany, Miss Scarlett is a young Chinese woman, Miss Ming. In Chile, the Reverend Green is a chef called Lettuce. In Finland, Colonel Mustard is Colonel Yellowbeak and in Switzerland he is Madame Curry.

The American company Hasbro, which acquired Waddingtons in 1994, has produced a few spinoffs, including Scooby Doo Cluedo, Harry Potter Cluedo, Simpsons Cluedo and Cluedo Junior: The Case Of The Missing Chocolate Cake. This year's version, though, gives the game its most complete makeover, and is designed to supersede the original. As well as new rooms and characters, Cluedo Reinvention includes a set of Intrigue cards and assigns special powers to each suspect. There are nine weapons instead of six, so there are no longer 324 possible solutions to the game (six characters times six weapons times nine rooms), but 486 (six times nine times nine).

The extra twists add some spice, but the eagerly contemporary detail is bound to feel tacky before long. The Englishness and datedness of the original game are intrinsic to its appeal. Cluedo has always had a nostalgic aura, blurrily reminiscent of creepy old houses and buried family secrets - our fascination with the country-house mystery is rooted in a Victorian obsession with reputation and domestic privacy. Colonel Mustard and Miss Scarlett have become cultural reference points, as have the billiard room, the candlestick, the lead piping. These are the images conjured up when people say, of a puzzling crime: "It's like a game of Cluedo."

Anthony Pratt made "a lot of money" from his invention, he said. "Some quarters I'd receive a cheque for something like £30,000, other quarters it would be only hundreds and my wife would lament that we weren't Americans, who'd have made a fortune." He gave up his job as a clerk and became a pianist, travelling the country with his cousin Paul Beard, leader of the BBC Symphony Orchestra. He bought houses in Bournemouth and Exmouth. But eventually the patents lapsed and with them the income. Pratt faded from view. When Waddingtons tried to track him down in the mid-90s to invite him to take part in Cluedo's 50th anniversary celebrations, they discovered that he had died in 1994, aged 90. His gravestone in Bromsgrove Cemetery, Worcestershire, describes him as the "inventor of Cluedo" and "a very dear father"; he had a daughter, Marcia.

Four years before his death, the Birmingham Evening Mail caught up with Pratt in his home in the city. He was by then a widower. The interviewer noted that he was eating a shepherd's pie provided by the local council's meals-on-wheels service and drinking a glass of madeira. In some ways, he still seemed to identify closely with his creation. When the reporter referred to Miss Scarlett as "Cluedo crumpet", Pratt recoiled: "That's a dreadful way to describe the poor girl. You might think that, but you mustn't say it. Goodness me, no." But when asked how he felt about losing the rights to his game, he showed no rancour. "We didn't mind, you know," he said. "It had been one of life's bonuses. A great deal of fun went into it. So why grumble?"

• Kate Summerscale's latest book, The Suspicions Of Mr Whicher, Or The Murder At Road Hill House, is published by Bloomsbury at £11.99.